Basses Terres - A Darker Rain

Basses Terres - A Darker Rain
With their limited-run releases, taste for grotty reboots of past styles, sleeve design indebted to Public Possession and Sex Tags, and occasional edgy title (How I Made My Mom & Sis' My Sexbot Slaves), it's easy to dismiss Brothers From Different Mothers as a stale infusion of recent trends. But the music on the young French label, mostly by unknown artists, has been ambitious and sophisticated. None more so than this debut from Basses Terres, which tries out a range of genres and nails it every time.

A Darker Rain's harder tracks catch the attention first. On opener "Any Other Way," dispassionate voices intone poetry over a kick drum and an unsettling high-end squeak. So far so drab, except the whole thing is smashed so hard into the red that it feels like the air's being crushed out of your lungs. Closer "Sonar System," co-produced with Seattle's Fugal, is a scorched breakbeat techno track that speeds along close to 140 BPM. Its pummelling breaks and kicks ought to be just as panic-inducing, but the atmospherics (clue's in the title) give the whole thing a watery bleakness. Both tracks imply recently popular styles—the former cold-wave techno, the latter the industrial revival—but command their own space.

The rest of the EP focusses on lush, downcast melody. "Going Until I Am Gone" is sultry electro, its chords clouding richly around the rasping percussion. "Self-Sufficient Hole"'s halftime drums and radiophonic bloops are harder to place, and all the more beguiling for it.